They could really microtarget prices if they have the data. Know there's going to be a party? Jack up the prices of those customer's favorite drinks and snacks. Know a customer is having a bad day? Jack up the price of their comfort foods.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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chapotraphouse
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when you go to complain that your lifestyle has arbitrarily risen in price 30% the little eichmans of the internet will dogpile you saying its a 'skill issue' you didnt sign up for all the apps, reward programs and coupons. that your lifestyle is actually bad and you should change it to save money. that you're a unhinged conspiracy theorist for thinking the "debunked" price flexibility programs are there to rip you off
Are we in a Black Mirror episode?
Always have been.
The lousy writing around 
and AI is a giveaway that we're in a late season episode.
Wot if the shop tracked ye spendin’ habits?
From 12 years ago...
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
Feb 16, 2012
This is the exact type of thing Surveillance Capitalism warns us about. Everyone on Earth needs to read that book like 10 years ago.
Walmart gangstalking
At another site a lib replied to me with this...
Our tech is now capable of destroying billions of lives financially in a matter of seconds. If Republicans take charge for the next four years they'll probably put price surges into the constitution as an inalienable right for corporations, which clearly matter more to them than human beings.
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Edit
Yes. This has ALWAYS been my most basic argument against GOP. Sure, there are some garbage Democrats, but ALL Republicans, even the most benign, support the idea that the right of a human to make a dollar supersedes the right of some other humans to exist. It's baked into basic Republican ideology.
At Bluesky you can see all the replies to your OP post. The functionality has its good and bad points. So far - nearly 100% good for me because my notifications have so little activity.
I'm still not voting for genocide joe
genocide joe
At Bluesky I have a huge number of people blocking me already so I decided not to use that yet. But I probably will if they reply back to me.
Where the fuck are the price controls under "Genocide" Joe Brandon, liberals?
I think it's: "why are you helping trump? Trump would put two price thingies on the shelf thingies! Ever think of that, Vlad?"
I appreciate this honestly. If I go in and see something I normally buy at one price suddenly and randomly jumped up to a much higher temporary new price, I'm just going to walk out the fucking door with it.
While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.
“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”
why did they interview a toddler for this article
Walmart values my patronage so I don’t imagine they would arbitrarily raise prices simply because they can
My heavens! It's unthinkable!
The world hasn't worked that way in a long-ass while. Maybe they're just old and out of touch?
I remember several occasions where a store/restaurant mildly fucked up and refunded or at least gave me a gift card, but not since like 2014. Now the gloves are off. I had Walmart steal my groceries one time on an online pick up order when their system went down. It was a "fuck you not sorry. Also you're being really unreasonable for being upset about this" situation where I had no money in my bank account and nothing to show for it. They do not care anymore.
That's very dubious, since where I live they have to honour the shelf price even if it's wrong.
What happens when they raise the price while I'm on the way to the register? How can I possibly counter this?
I actually had something similar happen to me. I grabbed something, I was mischarged, I told the cashier who told the manager who checked, and the manager changed the price while I was standing at the checkout and claimed it was always that price. I usually check the UPC when something is on clearance so I know I'm buying the right thing. I didn't buy the item.
Now I always walk with them to the aisle to see the price so they don't pull that on me.
Now I always walk with them to the aisle
Another reason the dems want to ban Tiktok. Imagine a 60s surge gouging vid where the Tiktoker films prices, goes to the register, the cashier pleads ignorance gets the manager, the manager vomits up a bald faced lies, and the Tiktoker shows them the vid of the "old" prices and says "You just lied to me ten times!" Once the public is aware of this - future vids could then be 30s or even eventually 10s gotcha vids.
I could only see this working if they straight-up close the store when the prices are adjusted or eventually maybe forcing shoppers to use carts/baskets with digital price tallies that you gotta' like press a button on each price display as you grab items or something. I don't know, a physical store with actual space and people is so much harder to rig like this than a digital storefront, I don't know if you can mesh them in a way that doesn't destroy any benefit for shopping in-person and I don't see how if the prices are raised enough it doesn't become beneficial for people to hire someone poorer for minimum wage to buy their groceries for them.
They put these in at various stores including a walmart I gotta go to for work and already many stores have switched back partially or fully to paper tags because the electronic ones are so unreliable and annoying
Enshittification working in our favor for once.
They can't even put the yoke on our necks because they can't build anything of quality without us.
LED or magnetic ink?
I’ve seen both kinds havent looked too close but I think the LEDs work better
as a person who doesn't steal with any regularity, this is a great idea to change my habits and get my theft numbers way way up
Change the price of the items you're stealing to $10k right before you walk out the door, felony.
oh, this is why windows is wasting bandwidth with constant weather and stock updates, isn't it?
$msft shares has fallen, billions will overpay for nailclippers 
Learn to hack, learn to quadcopter.
Or just learn to electromagnet
in minecraft, with redstone
Flipperzero
this is a core tenet of liberal ideology, even though it short circuits them as consumers who know what it feels like to be cheated: if you believe in capitalism you believe in prices being at the caprice of the seller
Surge gouging
Just steal it. Fuck corporate.
I don’t know if they still do this but I understood that at some point retailers were using Bluetooth and WiFi sniffers to track shoppers throughout stores so combined with variable pricing they can extract ever more from each customer
I don't know the current status on this, but it worked by recording your phone's mac address (or bluetooth address) when your phone scans for wifi networks. So it could track you without you even needing to join the network. AFAIK this particular tactic was countered by Android and IOS randomizing the mac address it sends out (your networking stack can simply lie about it).
If you do this I’m just stealing more than I already do laughing my fucking ass off
I'm wondering if they can be punctured with a little screwdriver or something you can conceal easily
How do they change the price on them? Can it be a cyberpunk era already where we hack them with a burner phone or something?
Off the bat, it's probably more that they will save on the materials and labor of having to send out reams of tags to every store in a company every week, and having employees come in, usually on 3rd shift, to swap tags. Having spent a lot of time working in a grocery store however, I can guarantee that these will malfunction regularly and most employees won't actually be trained in how to fix them.
Down the road I tho, "surge" pricing seems inevitable. Also raising prices based on inventory on hand. "Oh that item is twice the price because it's the last one left, sorry."
Good thing I have set prices I'm willing to pay for things like that. They're going to price us out of everything and then be like "😭 why aren't people buying treatssssssss??"
If they gonna steal from me I will steal from them. Simple.
Obvious shitty capitalism aside, electronic shelf labels would have saved me SO FUCKING MUCH TIME when I worked retail. Way too much of my day was hunting down the expired sale signs not taken down because I didn't work the night before and/or being the one that had to go through and replace them that night.
But of course, it would have HELPED so the company wasn't gonna spend money on that shit, we needed a new middle manager to micromanage the too few people actually working on the sales floor.